A Systematic Review on Architecting for Software Evolvability

Chen

Security and Communication Networks

2021

Software architecture evolution may lead to architecture erosion, resulting in the increase of software maintenance cost, the deterioration of software quality, the decline of software performance, and so on. In order to avoid software architecture erosion, we should evaluate the evolution effect of software architecture in time. This paper proposes a prediction method for the evolution effects of software architecture based on BP network. Firstly, this method proposes four evolution principles and evaluates the overall evolution effects based on the combined measurements. Then, we extract the evolutionary activities from release notes. Finally, we establish a prediction model for evolution effect based on BP network. Experimental results show that the proposed method can be used to predict the evolution effect.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Prediction Method for Evolution Effects of Software Architecture

Chen

Security and Communication Networks

2021

Proceedings of the Joint ACM SIGSOFT Conference -- QoSA and ACM SIGSOFT Symposium -- ISARCS on Quality of Software Architecture

“…Here, the term is not used in the sense of environment-friendliness as in other domains, but instead in the sense of cost-effective longevity and endurance. We do not use the terms 'maintainability' (ISO/IEC 25000), 'modifiability' [14], or 'evolvability' [15,19], because they arguably include the notions of longevity and cost-effectiveness only to a limited extent.…”

Section: Sustainabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the same manner, Roy and Graham [59] surveyed scenario-based evaluation methods, but provided only limited comparison of the metrics-based methods. Breivold and Crnkovic [19] provided a broad structured literature review on architecture evolvability, which also included experience-based methods, design methods, and knowledge management techniques but provided no sustainability analysis on the scenario-based and metrics-based evaluation methods.…”

Section: Related Reviewsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Sustainability evaluation of software architectures

Koziolek¹

2011

109

Long-living software systems are sustainable if they can be cost-efficiently maintained and evolved over their entire lifecycle. The quality of software architectures determines sustainability to a large extent. Scenario-based software architecture evaluation methods can support sustainability analysis, but they are still reluctantly used in practice. They are also not integrated with architecture-level metrics when evaluating implemented systems, which limits their capabilities. Existing literature reviews for architecture evaluation focus on scenario-based methods, but do not provide a critical reflection of the applicability of such methods for sustainability evaluation. Our goal is to measure the sustainability of a software architecture both during early design using scenarios and during evolution using scenarios and metrics, which is highly relevant in practice. We thus provide a systematic literature review assessing scenario-based methods for sustainability support and categorize more than 40 architecture-level metrics according to several design principles. Our review identifies a need for further empirical research, for the integration of existing methods, and for the more efficient use of formal architectural models.

“…This question triggers the identification of the main indicators that contribute to negatively increasing the architectural degradation symptoms, which lead to generating problems such as deteriorating software performance [59,60], increasing software maintainability costs [61,62], and software architecture quality degradation [63,64].…”

Section: ) Developing a Review Protocolmentioning

confidence: 99%

Software Architecture Degradation in Open Source Software: A Systematic Literature Review

et al. 2020

Software architecture (SA) has a prominent role in all stages of system development. Given the persistent evolution of software systems over time, SA tends to be eroded or degraded. Such phenomenon is called architectural degradation. In light of this phenomenon, the current study focuses on problems of architectural erosion in the open-source software (OSS). There has been a significant research activity on the OSS over the last decade. Nonetheless, the architectural degradation problems in the OSS are still scattered and disorganized. In addition, there has been no systematic attempt made on existing studies to provide evidence, insight and better understanding for researchers and practitioners. The main objective of the present study is to provide a profound understanding and to review the existing studies on the architectural erosion of the OSS. In this study, we conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) to gather, organize, classify, and analyze the architectural degradation of previous papers published until the year 2020. The data for this study were collected from eight major online databases (ACM, Springer, ScienceDirect, Taylor, IEEE Explorer, Scopus, Web of Science, and Wiley). A total of 74 primary studies were identified as the final samples of this research. The results indicated that rapid software evolution, frequent changes, and the lack of developers' awareness are the most common causes occurred in architecture degradation. Meanwhile, the prominent key indicators of architectural erosion symptoms are code smells and architectural smells. Additionally, the results indicated the most commonly used of the proposed solution for addressing architectural erosion is the metrics-based strategy. Acknowledging the limitations of the current study, more studies are needed that focus on determining other causes that are still ambiguous and improving the other solutions to provide better results in the precision and effectiveness of addressing architectural erosion.